Go back, for a moment, to early July 2010. Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace was giddy, because his team’s owner, Michael Heisley, had agreed to give small forward Rudy Gay a very big contract.

“It’s a great day for the Grizzlies franchise to re-sign Rudy Gay,” Wallace said. “Rudy has been a cornerstone of our team for the past four seasons and was one of the top stars in perhaps the greatest free agent class in NBA history.”

The nearly $330 million the Heat committed in 2010 to, from left, LeBron James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade has paid off with at least one NBA title. (AP Photo)

Ah, remember the summer of 2010?

It was a giddy time in the NBA. All over the league, teams were proudly displaying their scrubbed-up payrolls, which had been plucked clean of contracts that extended into ’11, even if that meant shuttling off what might be otherwise useful players and draft picks.

There was an almost comical penuriousness going around, a paranoia about not being fully prepared for that offseason bonanza. This was, as Wallace said, the greatest free agent class in NBA history. In the offices of NBA numbers-crunchers, it was Y2K10.

In the end, though, the Summer of 2010 was an absurd flop. If that was the greatest class of free agent in league history, then the league is certainly hoping it doesn’t have any other great classes on the horizon.

It worked out for one team, of course. The obvious prize was LeBron James, and his defection from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Miami Heat—passing up what had been his presumed destination, the New York Knicks, along the way—altered the NBA forever.

Dwyane Wade, another free agent, stayed in Miami, and Chris Bosh joined them, the Heat committing to almost $330 million in salaries over a six-year period. We know how things have panned out for the Heat. They made back-to-back NBA Finals appearances, with probably another on the way, and a championship trophy in there as well.

But the Summer of ’10 went way beyond the Heat’s Big Trio—there were oodles of star players available, and even without James and Bosh, the market was humming.

Thing is, with the trade of Rudy Gay to the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday, it is easy to look back at that summer and see not a sparkling bonanza of free agent prizes, but a desolate minefield of mistakes that the NBA’s men with money just couldn’t avoid.

Start with Gay. Heisley was afraid someone (the Minnesota Timberwolves, in particular) would swoop in and give Gay a max-contract offer, one that was front-loaded in order to scare Memphis from matching.

So Heisley decided he would be the one to do the swooping and plied Gay with a five-year, $82 million contract. That deal can be somewhat defended—Gay was only 23 at the time, coming off a season in which he averaged 19.6 points on 46.6 percent shooting.

Heisley could not have known at the time that Gay had hit his ceiling and wouldn’t improve, nor could he have known that the league would be successful in passing a much more restrictive luxury tax setup after the following year’s lockout.

Still, Gay was a prized free agent that summer, and not even three years removed, Memphis badly regretted his contract and shipped him elsewhere. He is not alone on both of those counts.

Of all the landmine contracts signed that summer, none was quite so overwrought as the one the Atlanta Hawks gave Joe Johnson. With a maximum six-year, $119 million deal, Atlanta committed itself to a franchise player who was obviously not a franchise player.

Johnson is good, but he is not anywhere close to the elite company his paychecks suggest he should be keeping. Surprise, surprise—the Hawks beat the Grizzlies to the punch when it came to trade desperation, and sent Johnson to the Nets last summer, just two years after he signed his megadeal in Atlanta.

The two other biggest contracts given out in the Summer of ’10 are still weighing down the books of the teams that signed them, but not because those players have been such stellar performers—no, it’s because attempts to trade the recipients have failed miserably.

The first, of course, is Amare Stoudemire. The Suns were concerned enough about Stoudemire’s balky knee back in 2010 that the team determined it could not risk giving him a long-term deal.

The Knicks, having been jilted by James, jumped on the Stoudemire landmine, with five-year, $100 million gusto. He gave the Knicks one exciting, 25.3-points-per-game campaign, but since then, the Suns’ concerns have been borne out. Stoudemire missed 19 games last season, and his scoring dropped to 17.5 points per game. This year, after missing the first two months because of knee surgery, Stoudemire is averaging 12.7 points. He has been effective off the bench, but, obviously, the Knicks didn’t pay Stoudemire nine figures to be a sixth man.

The Chicago Bulls didn’t make nearly as big of a mistake as the Knicks did, but in the Bulls’ desperation to give point guard Derrick Rose some offensive help, they shelled out five years and $80 million for Carlos Boozer. Now, Boozer has played well lately, but, generally speaking, he has not meshed with Rose (who’s out with a knee injury, of course) and would have been traded last year had the Bulls been able to find a taker.

The Bulls still have their amnesty waiver in their back pocket, and there has been some thought given to using that to excise Boozer’s pay from the rolls. If Taj Gibson, who signed a long-term deal in the offseason, were playing better this season, Boozer would be a better candidate to be an amnesty cut.

If that were to happen, he would join four other fellow beneficiaries of the ’10 spending spree—Luis Scola (five years, $47 million) was amnestied by the Rockets, Travis Outlaw (five years, $35 million) was amnestied by the Nets, Darko Milicic (four years, $20 million) was amnestied by the Timberwolves, and Brendan Haywood (six years, $55 million) was cut by the Mavs.

That doesn’t mean every deal outside of South Beach was a dud that summer. Oddly enough, one of the most criticized deals of that summer—the Warriors’ giving David Lee $80 million over six years—doesn’t look so bad now, given the way things have gone for other free agents of that vintage and the way Golden State has improved.

The four years and $80 million the Mavs gave Dirk Nowitzki was a no-brainer, too, and though he has had injury problems in the last two seasons, he did get Dallas its first ring in 2011. No regrets there.

But it is rare for teams that went full-on into the free-agent market of 2010 to look back without regret. The trade of Gay to Toronto highlights that reality.